HONG KONG--The Chinese government promised cooperation with potential investors, a European regulator promised to keep hands off industry standards and Cisco Systems’ chairman promised more innovation – all in the name of enabling telecom technology to solve some of the world’s economic development challenges.

The promises came in the opening session of the ITU Telecom World 2006 conference here today, as a panel of luminaries discussed the current and future challenges of bringing the benefits of the digital live to the masses. The city of Hong Kong, represented by its financial secretary, Henry Tang, was held up as a shining example of digital deployment, with its 123% penetration of wireless phones.

Tang maintained it is government’s responsibility to address the multiple issues of the digital divide, including the access divide and what he termed “the usage divide and the usage quality divide.” It isn’t enough to provide access to broadband and other technologies, he said – government must also aid people in developing knowledge based on digital access. He pointed to the growing trend of “offshoring” lower-skilled work as a boon for Hong Kong as it has enabled the city to “free up the human resources in Hong Kong and allow them to move up to higher skilled jobs so that one in three people now in the Hong Kong labor force now have highly skilled or management jobs,” Tang said.

“It is incumbent on the governments of developing technologies to upgrade the knowledge level and skill of the population to create more flexibility to increase business,” he said. “The part of our work force with lower skills faces more competition for jobs so it must consistently upgrade knowledge and skill levels to maintain competitiveness. Knowledge is the most valuable commodity.”

At the same time, government must protect “strict intellectual property rights” and work to overcome different forms of cyber crime,” Tang said.

Xudong Wang, a minister within China’s Ministry of Information Industry, said his country has made substantial progress in building its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure but still has a long way to go. With 77 million broadband users and 890 wireless and wireline phone users, “we are still a developing country with low telephone and Internet penetration,” he said, promising 1 billion telephony users and 400 million broadband subscribers by 2010.

China is also working to bring connectivity to every village, one of the ITU’s goals, Wang said. He pledged to extend the government of China’s “cooperation to product win-win results, equality and mutual benefits.”

Yoshio Utsumi, ITU’s outgoing secretary general, said China and particularly Hong Kong are industry trend setters – China “will soon overtake the U.S. as the largest market for broadband and its growth rate is such that one fifth of the world’s ICT customers are in China,” he said. “It is increasingly the source of new trends. Hong Kong is a living laboratory for new technologies like IPTV and HSDPA.”

Cisco’s Chairman and CEO John Chambers took over the podium when it was his turn to speak, eschewing the seat on the stage that others had used and instead pacing in front of the podium’s dignitaries’ table and even jumping down to pace the floor of the room in front of the audience, to the amusement and delight of the largely Asian crowd.

Chambers urged the audience to share his vision of the network as the platform for new services and new intelligence that enables content to be delivered to a multitude of different devices based resident intelligence that can choose the appropriate device and format content accordingly. Collaboration and interactivity are the next great service fronts, he added, citing the example of a new breed of baseball park. With 20 to 30 cameras scattered around the field, fans using handheld devices of their choice will be able to select the preferred view and wireless send messages, encoded with video, to friends and family who aren’t available, while also scooping out available concessions and game information.

“Sporting events will be about collaboration,” he said.

But it is important for service providers to recognize the dramatic shifts in their business, away from access and transport to creating new services based on network intelligence, Chambers said.

Governments and regulators also have to adjust to change, said Viviane Redding, a European Union commissioner responsible for Information, Society and Media. She cited the success of GSM, based on the work of European service providers and regulators to pick one standard for pan-European digital wireless. Sorting through multiple standards today would be a much more daunting task and one better left to the commercial markets.